CHARLOTTE, N.C.—There is a side of Temple that’s a very deserving NCAA Tournament team, one worthy of a lofty seed on Selection Sunday.

That team beat Syracuse a few days before Christmas, when the Orange were undefeated and ranked No. 3 in the country, and that team knocked off Atlantic 10 juggernaut Saint Louis by 10 points in mid-January. That team also owns a 15-point win against Villanova that looks much better now than it did in December.

“As a program, we know we can play with anybody in the country,” senior Scootie Randall says. “When we lose, we beat ourselves. Even the great teams have losses.”

The great teams don’t have losses like Temple has, though. And that’s the other side of Temple, the team that has lost to Canisius and St. Bonaventure and, most recently, Duquesne—all at home. That’s the Temple team only worthy of a spot in the NIT, if that.

Put those two vastly divergent teams together—it’s that pesky “body of work” philosophy the selection committee holds to—and you have a bubble squad that will be sweating out Selection Sunday. The loss to Duquesne, on February 14, that was the potential at-large killer. That loss, to a team that was winless in the A-10 heading into that game, eliminated any margin for error. That loss put Temple’s streak of five consecutive NCAA Tournament appearances under coach Fran Dunphy in serious jeopardy.

Since then, though, the Owls have done what is necessary.

“That loss to Duquesne was tough,” senior guard Khalif Wyatt said, “but we did a great job putting it behind us and going on to UMass, because we needed that win.”

The Owls won by one point at Massachusetts—their fifth one-point decision in a row, by the way—then beat La Salle at home and, on Sunday afternoon, earned a 71-51 victory on the road against Charlotte.

All three of those opponents were harboring their own NCAA dreams, which made all three games pretty intense.

“Playing at UMass, at Charlotte, La Salle at home, you know, that was a tough stretch,” Randall said. “But we’ve got to get it done. That’s Coach Dun’s philosophy. We have to get it done.”

Randall had a team-high 18 points Sunday in the 20-point win against Charlotte, a team that nearly upended the Owls in Philadelphia earlier this month in a game that finished 89-88. This time around, Temple bottled up Charlotte’s leading scorer, Chris Braswell, and dared other members of the offensively challenged 49ers to beat them.

Braswell was just 1-for-6 from the field and tied his season-low with four points. Despite his struggles the 49ers still had an opportunity to make this into a close game; they had 20 offensive rebounds in the game and converted those into 21 second-chance points. Charlotte, which trailed by 15 at halftime, trimmed the Owls’ lead to single digits on four separate occasions in the second half.

Three of those times, Temple immediately scored on the ensuing possession. The other time, the Owls scored on the second possession to push the lead back to double digits.

“That’s an experienced team making plays when they need to make them,” Charlotte coach Alan Major said.

Temple finished the game 10-for-24 from beyond the 3-point arc, a stark contrast to Charlotte’s 1-for-12 showing; the 49ers made just 17 of 62 shots in the game (27.4 percent).

This win doesn’t lock up an at-large bid for Temple—there’s plenty of basketball left, full of opportunities for good and bad things to happen—but it’s another step.

“Now we’re starting to play good,” Wyatt said. “Guys are starting to hit shots, we’re playing better defense and we’ve got some momentum going. We want to carry that into Thursday against Detroit, which is going to be another good test for us. We just want to keep taking it one game at a time, and keep building some momentum.”